"Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?" An introduction to the issues (for another forum but suitable for reposting here)

As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, http://911scholars.org, and the manager of its forum, http://911scholars.ning.com, I would like to take the occasion of Evan Burton's announcement of the creation of a more organized 9/11 research section to present some of the findings of members of Scholars, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, and other 9/11 research organizations, to identify some of the most controversial aspects of 9/11 research and offer some resources for consideration.

The most controversial aspects of 9/11 research concern how the Twin Towers were destroyed, the possibility of video fakery on 9/11 (especially in relation to the hit on the South Tower), whether a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, and who was responsible for bringing this about, where indications of Israeli involvement are especially controversial. The resources provided here are intended to provide an introduction to these issues. They are not "the last word".

But they are intended to provide the basis for understanding why the "official account" of 9/11 cannot be sustained and enough information to appreciate why these issues are controersial within the 9/11 community, without resolving them. Those who are unaware of the breadth and depth of support for the 9/11 movement, moreover, should visit http://patriotsquestion911.com, where they will find bio sketches and statements from no less than

400+ Medical Professionals

1,200+ Engineers and Architects

400+ Professors Question 9/11

250+ Pilots and Aviation Professionals

300+ 9/11 Survivors and Family Members

200+ Artists, Entertainers, and Media Professionals

220+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials

OFFICIAL ACCOUNT:

Nineteen Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air-defense system in the world, and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan. For an overview of how we know that this story is fabricated, view "Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?", http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html, and check out some of the (more than a dozen) videos recommended there.

9/11 RESEARCH FINDINGS:

1. The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

2. Most of the jet fuel, principally kerosene, burned up in those fireballs in the first fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the South, those buildings were stone cold steel, unaffected by any fires at all other than some very modest office fires that burned around 500 degrees F, which functioned as a massive heat sink dissipating the heat from the steel.

3. The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees F and the others not above 1200.

4. Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000 degrees F for three or four hours without any significant effects, where these fires burned neither long enough or hot enough—at an average temperature of about 500 degrees for about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North—to weaken, much less melt.

5. If the steel had melted or weakened, then the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some degree of asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt and total demolition that was observed. Which means the NIST cannot even explain the initiation of any “collapse” sequence.

6. The top 30 floors of the South Tower pivoted and fell to the side, turning to dust before it reached the horizontal. So it did not even exist to exert any downward pressure on the lower 80 floors. A high-school physics teacher, Charles Boldwyn, moreover, has calculated that, if you take the top 16 floors of the North Tower as one unit of downward force, there were 199 units of upward force to counteract it.

7. William Rodriguez, who was the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton hydraulic press and the ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, where they filled with water that drained the sprinkler system.

8. Rodriguez observed that the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from upper floors, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job,” demonstrating that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before the presumptive airplane impacts.

9. Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of “pancake collapse,” which normally occurs only with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.

10. The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result that would be impossible without extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.

11. Indeed, the towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the buildings, the government’s account cannot possibly explain. There were no pancakes.

12. WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to “pull it,” displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, yielding a stack of pancakes about 5 floors high.

13. Had the Twin Towers done the same thing, there would have been two stacks of "pancakes equal to about 12% the height of the buildings or around 15 floors high. But they were actually reduced to below ground level. Since there were no "pancakes", there cannot have been any "pancake collapse" of either building.

14. The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44-feet above the ground; the debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines were recovered, which means that the official account is not true.

15. The Pentagon’s own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when one was shown on “The O’Reilly Factor”; at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account.

16. The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory—flying at high speed barely above ground level—physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet of the ground, which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible.

17. Data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if this data corresponds to a Boeing 757, it would have flown over the Pentagon rather than hit it.

18. If Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done. Even the singed trees and shrubs were trimmed, apparently to make it impossible to subject them to chemical analysis.

19. There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly these planes and their names are not on any original, authenticated passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they were even aboard the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked. Did Osama call from a cave in Afghanistan and charge them to his MasterCard?

20. President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, then who is responsible for the death of 3,000 citizens that day?

We believe that it is the highest form of respect to those who died on 9/11 and their survivors to establish how and why they died, which our own government manifestly has not done. With the American media under the thumb of a corrupt administration, we cannot count on the press to perform its investigative function. But we can do our best to expose falsehoods and reveal truths about 9/11.

That link is a great find from 1996! Five years before 9/11 is just about right for having an operational version to test on suitable targets. Excellent! Very interesting. Pilots for 9/11 Truth, of course, has studied the flight data recorder data provided by the NSTB as that for Flight 77 and found that it corresponds to a trajectory almost perpendicular to the building heading due east rather than the acute angle of the north-easterly approach of the "official account", which would have been too high to take out any lampposts and was still to high to impact with the building, which it swooped over, just as the trucker buddy of a friend of mine told him. I know Jesse and have no doubt he was sincere in what he presented, even though I agree that the idea that the black boxes were found is a stretch. Judy's theory deserves respect, especially with this kind of confirmation. Great find!

I didn't mean to launch off in another direction without acknowledging your comment: You and I aren't really disagreeing on much.

As I was thinking about what has really teed me off with different stories put out the the 9/11 truth community over the past year, it has been things like:

1. Jesse Ventura's way over the top emphasis in his TruTV special on 9/11, on the idea that the black boxes of the WTC planes were found, but that fact is being covered up. I see Jesse as a newbie / innocent, but I do wonder if someone who influenced the production of that video knew they could throw some disinfo in.

2. The "big news" that the flight controller data released by the NTSB for flight 77 showed that the cockpit door was never opened during the flight after take off. For anyone who had been following the forensics on the released data, all the signs were already along the lines of the data being manufactured (there were an large number of reboots of the FDR computer, which is highly irregular). So, the headline was "hijacking impossible", when the headline should have been FDR data not worth jack to prove anything.

The following may not be appropriate in this comment thread, because I know so little about it's authenticity or what it in-fact means. On the other hand, it seems to fill in what we have info missing. A facebook friend posted this document:

Excellent commentary! None of the 20 points enumerated above is inconsistent with flying objects having been involved, with the possible exception of Shanksville, where I explicitly discuss the possibility that either Flight 93 was shot down or else landed in Cleveland! The planes involved in the flights were not deregistered with the FAA until 01/14/2002 in the case of AA #11 (which purportedly hit the North Tower) and AA #77 (which purportedly hit the Pentagon) and not until 09/28/2005 in the case of United #175 (which purportedly hit the South Tower) and United #93 which purportedly crashed in Shanksville. If none of these planes was involved, that does not preclude other flying objects, which I explicitly discuss in "Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?" in every version I can recall, where the video indications are consistent with reports from witnesses if what they were observing was a holographic image enveloping a missile, for example, which could fly faster than possible for a 767, enter a building in apparent violation of Newton's laws (because it was actually a missile, not plane, the interaction of which would have been quite different) and could presumably pass thought its own length into the building in the same number of frames that it passes through its own length in air, but where the Munster-like cut outs in the sides of the buildings still had to have been created by cleverly placed explosive changes.

Great post, Jim. I would like to offer a slightly modified way of framing. I don't mean to be ad hom, disrespectful, or in any way distracting from the reasonable narrative and links you have provided.

After review the videos, photos, documented evidence ( official / unofficial ) of the crash sites of 9/11/2001, I offer a working hypothesis along the following lines:

None of the 4 jetliners alleged to have crashed at 9/11 crash sites were in fact present. I support you and others such as Dean Hartwell who are continuing to push for consideration of variations on this track.

I have definite criticisms of other theories and theoreticians which propose close cousins of what I state above. For example, although I acknowledge certain solid facts and reasoning behind that idea that one or more flights did not fly at all that day, I would cast my vote toward the idea that the flights did indeed depart the airports. I have to admit that fact that AA 11 has been associated with departing from both gate 26 and gate 32 is a mystery still vexing.

Thus, I propose that uniformly, objects which impacted the Towers, and the Pentagon were not Passenger Airliners. Could the debris found at Shanksville been part of a Jetliner?.... I doubt it, but I generally try to withhold any conclusions about Flight 93.

I think that there may be a combination of planted evidence at the crash sites, as well as some evidence being part of some kind of military aircraft which did in fact crash.

I salute you, Killtown, Morgon Reynolds, Elias Davidsson, and many others for bringing forward evidence and commentary which has been essential. I have to also give Ace Baker his due, if only because his claims drove me to continue to dig deeper to justify my rejection of his "nose-out" fakery claim. This doesn't mean I reject all claims of fakery at the WTC.

I think the idea that the speed of the moving object involved in the 2nd hit at the WTC rules out that the object was a Boeing 767 is salient. However, I think there are a large number of factors such as the nature of he impact and damage to the building and explosions around WTC 2 which also preclude that object being any unmodified large passenger jetliner.

Clearly we see incendiaries, bombs, explosives in the WTC are at play (prior to any demo). along with what may have been part of the projectiles. For me, seeing in certain videos the detonations going off on the side of building of WTC 1, at the same time that the WTC2 strike is occurring is almost as jaw dropping as the WTC 7 demo footage.

For many good reasons, which require a much expanded discussion, I reject that idea that there were no flying objects involved in the the WTC crashes or the Pentagon at all.

In closing, I would ask that all to stop by the website: 911truth.wetpaint.com This is a wiki where I've being trying to create as an independent encyclopedia of 9/11 truth topics. Everyone is allowed to edit.